Newport Museum and Art Gallery

Newport Museum and Art Gallery stands in the heart of the city on John Frost Square, next to the Kingsway Shopping Centre. The building opened in 1968 and replaced an earlier museum founded in 1888. Inside, four main collections cover archaeology, social history, art and natural history. The oldest items are stone tools left by hunter-gatherers along the Severn estuary long ago. Roman finds from Caerwent and Caerleon form one of Wales’s finest Roman collections. Medieval discoveries include objects from Penhow Castle and other local sites. The social history collection centres on the 1839 Chartist uprising in Newport, with weapons, broadsheets and silver on display. The Transporter Bridge archive holds every original design drawing and photographs of its construction. Paintings by British artists such as Sir Stanley Spencer, Dame Laura Knight and L S Lowry share space with works by Welsh painters Kyffin Williams, Ceri Richards and Stanley Lewis. Decorative arts include the John Wait teapot collection and porcelain by Iris Fox, alongside sculpture by Sir Jacob Epstein and ceramics by Lucy Rie and Ewen Henderson. The art gallery hosts rotating exhibitions of British paintings, watercolours and contemporary works. Past shows have drawn large crowds, including 20,000 visitors for a single controversial painting. The library inside the building serves as the city’s central public library and the hub of Newport’s wider library network. A planned redevelopment led to the recreation of the Chartist Mural within the library after the original was demolished.